Business

The evidence is not only anecdotal. A recent study by Aaron Clauset, Samuel Arbesman, and Daniel B. Larremore shows that “a quarter of all universities account for 71 to 86 percent of all tenure-track faculty in the U.S. and Canada in these three fields. Just 18 elite universities produce half of all computer science professors, 16 schools produce half of all business professors, and eight schools account for half of all history professors.” This study follows the discovery ...

There I managed to buy the factories in a key star hub and set up shop. I produced the first Mammoths (a massive transport ship critical to trade) in the game, and also the first Minmatar battleships. I would have loved to expand my production but within days of the retail launch all factories had been bought up and idled by speculators who were charging $300 to $400 per factory, without any way of knowing if they really owned the ...

When you all fit around a single table (or a single Google Hangout) it’s easy for everyone to feel like they know what’s going on. Most people were probably wearing multiple hats and in constant communication as you focused on a single, core thing your business tries to do well.

But now things, have changed. Not only do people wear fewer hats, you probably even have multiple people to do many of the jobs.

There are people who have the social skills to actively listen to someone else’s technical points, to guide a discussion with questions of their own, or to spot opportunities to redirect a tough question back to familiar territory. Those people build impressive resumes. They effortlessly pass “culture fit” tests. And a lot of them can’t code.

From GeoCities to MySpace to Facebook the trend has been to less customization. Perhaps this is specialization: if you want a website, then go get a website, but if you want social, then let’s stick with a standard UI so that folks can focus on the social bits.

Could they have avoided losing out to Facebook? I think if they created MySpace 2.0 without all the crap (essentially what Facebook did) and made it easy to migrate your accounts and ...

After 1945, the USA lead the effort to establish a liberal zone of less restricted trade, an effort to step away from the protectionism of 1914-1945. And for awhile the leadership of the USA was unified on the need for this effort. But consensus is dying:

Summers’s ascendance is a reflection of the abandonment by much of the party establishment of neo-liberal thinking, premised on the belief that unregulated markets and global trade would produce growth beneficial to worker and C.E.O. ...

Sweet Briar officials cited overarching challenges that the college has been unable to handle: the lack of interest from female high school students in attending a women’s college like Sweet Briar, declining interest in liberal arts colleges generally and declining interest in attending colleges in rural areas. Sweet Briar is in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. “We are 30 minutes from a Starbucks,” said James F. Jones Jr., president of ...

At this point I think I can reasonably say that I’ve read thousands of stories about the stupid incompetence of mid-level managers. And I’m beginning to wonder if this genre of story is teaching us an important truth. I used to think the answer was “yes” but now I’m wondering, why do companies continue to have mid-level managers, given the endless number of these stories that have been brought up, at least since the 1960s, if not earlier?

One of the highest profile positive symbols of the new generation of empowered women is Lena Dunham. I am avowedly not a fan of the TV show “Girls,” which I thought meant I wasn’t a fan of its creator. But my respect for Dunham just keeps growing with every interview with her I’ve read.

Last month, in the airport on the way to Nashville, I picked up a copy of Elle magazine which had Dunham on the cover. It ...

The metal detectors, and the overall heightened security presence at Sarkeesian’s talk, were impossible not to notice. I heard a few attendees mutter about this being necessary or finding it absurd that a talk about women in gaming, of all things, required this kind of presence. An NYU rep told me they hadn’t set up metal detectors for any Game Center talks before. The people who make Dragon Age didn’t get this kind of security.

When I quit my job to pursue my startup, I moved into a co-working space in Brooklyn and sat across a real estate broker. One day, he told me he wanted to have a website that his clients could log into and view available properties to rent over a map based layout. He talked to some development shops and got quoted for $X. $X turned out to be significantly greater than his budget and twice as much ...

They make it sound like they need 8,000 programmers to run a website. Even Google doesn’t have that many engineers. I sure hope that the reporter got the story wrong. Otherwise this sounds like waste on a staggering scale.

Two years ago, Chief Information Officer Randy Mott ended GM’s $3 billion a year outsourcing deal with Hewlett-Packard Co. , replacing it and others with about 8,000 GM software engineers, up from 1,400 previously. “Because we brought the [information technology] work ...

Because I have posted my cell phone number on my website, random strangers often reach out to me for advice about their startup ideas. 99% of the time they are very innocent and inexperienced, so I have no desire to work with them, but I am usually happy to give advice. Some of them seem reasonably smart, and others seem utterly clueless.

Last night at 2:30 AM someone started text me. This was our conversation:

I think the word “negging” came from the world of pickup artists (PUAs) but now is just a general tactic for being awful to people:

So I just got a call from a guy claiming to be the director of Software in the Public Interest. Which I guess is a non-profit organization. But it felt like a really aggressive sales call. He started off with some very heavy negging and I was just trying to get him to explain what ...

As developed economies have substituted away from manufacturing towards services, so too have developing countries – to an even greater extent. Such sectoral change may be premature for economies that never fully industrialised in the first place. This column presents evidence that countries with smaller manufacturing sectors substitute away from manufacturing to a larger extent, suggesting a trade channel through which falling international relative prices of manufacturing lead price-taking developing economies to substitute accordingly.

Apparently the movie 50 Shades Of Grey is a huge success on its opening weekend. That must be because of reviews like this:

A movie based on one of the worst books in the history of the English language ought to change a hell of a lot if it wants any hope of being a movie that doesn’t top next year’s Razzie Award list. If the film’s directors and editors and producers hadn’t omitted certain scenes, the film would play like ...

My husband has worked in the video game industry for just about 14 years. It was always his dream to make video games, and it was a goal he’s worked towards since he began learning to program at 12 years old. One day on a whim, he applied to a major console game developer, and three weeks later our family of five was moving to California.

The company my husband was working for was really great. The benefits ...

There are actually multiple revelations in that article. For one thing, it attacks not just QE2, which was about to commence, but QE1 — the Fed’s intervention during the chaotic post-Lehman period — which is generally considered to have been quite effective. Their evidence to the contrary? “QE1 failed to strengthen the economy, which has remained in a high-unemployment, low-growth slump.” Also, when I stepped outside this morning, it was cold, so I put on a coat — ...

Every company I have worked at has had too many meetings, with too many people in the meetings. You can tell too many people are in the meetings because if you look around the room you can see that most people are bored, most have started to daydream, some are texting on their phones. As I see it, if you are manager, all your interactions are of 1 of 2 types:

I’ve long believed that Matthew Yglesias hit on something really important when he noted that small-country politicians generally have personal incentives to go along with troika demands even if they are against their nation’s interests:

Normally you would think that a national prime minister’s best option is to try to do the stuff that’s likely to get him re-elected. No matter how bleak the outlook, this is your dominant strategy. But in the era of globalization and EU-ification, I think ...

Because 50 Shades of Grey is a sex movie, Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan have routinely been asked about sex. Because Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan seem to dislike at least this specific sort of sex (fake sex, with a person they hate, in a movie they made for a job they regret), they routinely display discomfort (ranging from wide-eyed confusion to intense aversion) when talking about sex, in ...

“Third, it makes no sense to blame the recipients of the capital inflows for causing the crisis. If enough money is sloshing around willing to invest in any stupid idea, you shouldn’t be too surprised that a lot of stupid ideas get funded. When, for example, Wolfgang Schaeuble, Germany’s finance minister, says: “The reasons for Greece’s problems can be attributable only to Greece and not to actors outside the country, and certainly not in Germany.” As he ...

Money had been pouring into venture capital since a 1978 change in regulations allowed pension funds to consider it a “prudent” investment. The $2.5 billion managed by venture capital firms in 1977 quintupled by 1983 to $12 billion2. New money committed per year rose 16x over five years, from $218 million in 1978 to $3.6 billion in 19833. The number of venture funds grew from 47 in 1980, to 71 in 1982, to 113 in 1983. The number of investment ...

Yet another threat to start-ups comes from state legislatures, in the form of increasingly cumbersome employment regulations. Historically, technical workers such as mechanics and engineers moved freely from job to job, spreading new technologies across the industry. Today, however, a variety of regulations limit that mobility. Some states—Florida and Massachusetts, for instance—have made it easy for employers to enforce noncompete agreements, which prohibit employees from leaving one company to join or start another in the same industry. According to research ...

Violet Blue lists the problems she faces because she writes about sex. Since I’m working on software for midwives, it strikes me there is some common theme here. Writing about sex faces outright censorship, whereas trying to get information to pregnant women faces a different kind of censorship, the legal prohibition against giving medical advice unless you are a doctor — a seemingly reasonable limit until you realize how many women are desperately frustrated with their doctor and unable to ...

Isn’t it surprising that this is happening now and not in, say for instance, 1999? Or is this perhaps an evergreen story that is being recycled (because I seem to recall similar articles almost 15 years ago)?

About this:

“That’s because the degree suggests a person steeped in finance and corporate strategy rather than in the digital-age arts of speed and constant experimentation — and in skills like A/B testing, rapid prototyping and data-driven decision ...

Retail historians date the start of [Montgomery Ward’s] decline to the postwar boom of the 1950’s, when its rival, Sears, Roebuck & Company, moved aggressively into the then nascent suburbs, while Ward, under the steely leadership of its then chief executive, Sewell Avery, hoarded cash and waited for a second Great Depression.

Reverse marketing works sometimes. When Caesar Augustus made himself dictator of Rome, he claimed he was restoring the Roman Republic. Likewise, RealSimple is about the hassle of orchestrating complicated social relations and calculations of social status:

Then there are hostesses who meet our approval, like Auntie Mame, who glides about her apartment in a boozy and stylish haze. Like Clarissa Dalloway, she has servants to help (and eventually, her young nephew Patrick to mix martinis), but her skill seems to ...

Yet, I still struggle with the fact that I’m no better off financially than I was when I started on this journey. In fact, it’s worse. I now have a wife, three kids, two dogs and a mortgage. All of that meaning that I can no longer take big risks. I need health insurance. I need a salary — and that salary needs to cover my family expenses. And, because I’ve ran so lean for the past 10 years, there ...

There is the related issue, going back to the beginning of the human race, regarding the deference that humans grant one another. Should we allow others to judge us? If so, how much? But now there is the more modern issue of allowing a for-profit corporation to moderate much of that calculation of social status. Personally, I shut down my Facebook account in 2011.

And therein lies the problem. Facebook largely sets its own rules for what its rules are. ...

One answer, which seems obvious only in retrospect: Wikipedia attracted contributors because it was built around a familiar product – the encyclopedia. Encyclopedias aren’t just artifacts; they’re also epistemic frames. They employ a particular – and, yet, universal – approach to organizing information. Prior to Wikipedia, online encyclopedias tried to do what we tend to think is a good thing when it comes to the web: challenging old metaphors, exploding analog traditions, inventing entirely new forms…Another intriguing finding: Wikipedia ...

The ultimate paradox of how our species currently reproduces itself is that we have managed to make human birth an inhuman medical experience. Think how strange it is that policy-makers even need this advice:

Policy makers who wish to achieve clinically important improvements in maternity care, particularly around normalising and humanising birth and preventing preterm birth should consider midwife-led continuity models of care and consider how financing of midwife-led services can be reviewed to support this.

The basic cause of the decline is the English Wikipedia’s increasingly narrow attitude as to what are acceptable topics and to what depth those topics can be explored, combined with a narrowed attitude as to what are acceptable sources, where academic & media coverage trumps any consideration of other factors.

I started as an anon, making occasional small edits after I learned of WP from Slashdot in 2004. I happened to be a contributor to Everything2 at the time, and when ...

Interesting to think that after The Great Newbie Flood of the 1990s, some people gave up on IRC and now it is better than it was:

IRC today is the opposite of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September. People who still use IRC are mostly well-mannered, skillful and welcoming of others, and things only seem to get better day-by-day. People who are unresponsive to email, Tweets and other means of communication can be very responsive on IRC. More signal less noise, I quess.

I am especially curious why people become defensive when this issue is raised:

While most people express initial concerns about recent trends of increasing inequality, there tends to be a negative reaction about accepting that this is indeed a failure of our current economic model and most become very defensive when that argument is being made.

Back in 1994 LR Iannaccone wrote “Why strict churches are strong” and the gist of the argument was:

The strength of strict churches is neither a historical coincidence nor a statistical artifact. Strictness makes organizations stronger and more attractive because it reduces free riding. It screens out members who lack commitment and stimulates participation among those who remain. Rational choice theory thus explains the success of sects, cults, and conservative denominations without recourse to ...

More news on the gender front, this time comparing female MBAs with their husbands:

The male graduates were much more likely to be in senior management positions and have more responsibility and more direct reports than their female peers. But why? It’s not because women are leaving the workforce en masse. The authors found, definitively, that the “opt-out” explanation is a myth. Among Gen X and baby boomers they surveyed, only 11 percent of women left the workforce to be ...

The 1990s were a time of wild commercial optimism, driven by the end of the cold war, rapidly burgeoning public access to the internet, and deregulation of financial and banking controls. All of these came with an eventual crash and an ugly hangover in the following decade, but at the time funds managers poured money into whatever high-tech startup sounded good with a cocaine high. Roton, the fully reusable surface-to-orbit helicopter, got funding. VCs lined up ...

Like most scares, the toilet paper fiasco all started with an unsubstantiated rumor. In November of 1973, several news agencies reported a tissue shortage in Japan. Initially, the release went unnoticed and nobody seemed to put much stock in it — save for one Harold V. Froelich. Froelich, a 41-year-old Republican congressman, presided over a heavily-forested district in Wisconsin and had recently been receiving complaints from constituents about a reduced stream of pulp paper. On November 16th, he released his ...

Recently, I have come to understand that some of you may have—and I’m not pointing any fingers here or anything—on occasion found love that you might immediately regret upon waking up the morning after. Let’s talk about that. In times of yore you would have woken up in a panic, scrambling in the dark trying to find your fur coat or velvet smoking jacket or whatever it is you cool ...

Marc Andreessen makes a good point about the diversity of males in the tech industry. But there are some racial groups that are left out of the industry, in particular, blacks and hispanics. The tech industry is one of the few industries that is fast growing and high paying, so it is important that groups that have been historically discriminated against, in the USA, be included. Also, Andreessen’s point mostly applies to men, not women.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is allowing his company to engage in some shameful tactics. This is a story from multiple sources, and of multiple incidents.

Ellen Cushing at Modern Luxury writes:

While I was reporting my recent cover story on Uber and its CEO Travis Kalanick, several current and former Uber employees warned me that company higher-ups might access my rider logs. Because I couldn’t independently verify these claims without sacrificing my sources’ anonymity, I didn’t include ...

Yet the man who wills property does so without regard to its effect on the social distribution of wealth. In fact even from the private point of view careful thought is seldom bestowed on the solemn responsibility of bequeathing property. The ordinary millionaire capitalist about to leave this world forever cares less about what becomes of the fortune he leaves behind than we have been accustomed to assume. Contrary to a common opinion, he did not lay it up, at ...

This is from 1964, though parts of it seem to be talking about the modern era:

Today there are probably more than twenty thousand computers in use within the United States, and correspondingly large numbers are installed in many other countries around the world. Computers run at speeds of up to millions of operations per second, and do so with negligible rates of error. Their linguistic abilities have been broadened impressively through development of elaborate programming systems, and their memories can ...

ON MONDAY: You are on your way to the fruit market, because you want to buy five oranges. Someone you’ve never met before accosts you on your way and says “Hey, you! Could you buy me five oranges please? I’ll give you the money when you come back and pay you ten pence for doing it”. You think what the hell, and say yes.
Down at the market, there is one stall which has five oranges for sale at 50p each, ...

Open collaboration systems like Wikipedia need to maintain a pool of volunteer contributors in order to remain relevant. Wikipedia was created through a tremendous number of contributions by millions of contributors. However, recent research has shown that the number of active contributors in Wikipedia has been declining steadily for years, and suggests that a sharp decline in the retention of newcomers is the cause. This paper presents data that show that several changes the Wikipedia community made to manage ...

Almost any way we look at it, maternal and infant health outcomes in the United States are far worse than they should be. Our infant mortality rate is on par with Poland, our maternal death rate just above Iran. We’re one of just eight countries in the world with rising maternal death rates, a distinction we share with Chad and Afghanistan. Our preterm birth rate has nudged down in recent years, but it’s hardly ...

Amy Romano is writing an in-depth series of blog posts on health care in the USA. I wish I was a bit more optimistic about the chance of reform in the USA, but certainly it helps to be aware of the programs that are known to work in various countries. Regarding the Nurse-Family Partnership programs she writes:

These included reconnecting personal health to relationships, and impacting the whole person, not just the “disease.” These are the crux of Nurse-Family Partnership ...

Maybe you are a researcher…
We care a lot about you. We know that improved maternity care can only be a reality for everyone when we can have access to quality data. Collection, validation and linking of maternity data sets is what our platform does. We can receive data from multiple sources, included patients, and help standardize and shape the data into something so useful and relevant, ...

But, of course, like any conspiracy theory, it all starts off sounding plausible enough. First, they say the government understates inflation when it adjusts for the quality of goods and how people substitute for similar but cheaper ones. The only problem is that independent measures, like MIT’s Billion Prices Project, have shown inflation is pretty much what the government says it is (although there’s been a very slight difference the past few months). Then they point out that ...

I wonder if this should be considered a risk of allowing an employee to develop a crucial bit of technology as an open-source project?

I joined LinkedIn about seven years ago. At the time I joined, the company was just starting to run into scaling problems in its core database, its social graph system, its search engine, and its data warehouse. Each of the systems that stored data couldn’t keep pace with the growing user base. At the time, each of ...

This is well said (these are also the same reason that there are no comments on this blog):

During the past few years, much has changed about how readers interact with news. They find coverage in diverse places and in new ways. They watch video, use graphics and calculators and relate to content far differently than in the past.

Considering these dynamics, Reuters.com is ending user comments on news stories. Much of the well-informed and articulate discussion around news, as well ...

I went to Poland in 2012 and I was dazzled by the affluence, which was much greater than what I expected from a post-Communist country. I then began to study the situation, and it became obvious to me that Poland’s success was exceptional (it has been the fastest growing nation in Europe for most of the last 10 years). I also failed to appreciate the extent of the disaster that has befallen most post-Communist nations. Most of them still have ...

This is impressive. Parsely claims that it wants to do all development in the open. They are donating a lot of their technology to open source, and they are being open about their process. How open are there? How about this, the CTO and a lead engineer have a conversation in public about the quality of the work:

This doesn’t look quite ready for prime time. Though “storm submit” works, it fails to produce a working topology on my locally-installed ...

Max Read has a good post: “How We Got Rolled by the Dishonest Fascists of Gamergate“:

On October 1, the computing giant Intel pulled its ads from Gamasutra, a trade website for game developers, over an essay called “‘Gamers’ don’t have to be your audience. ‘Gamers’ are over” by a journalist named Leigh Alexander. Intel had been successfully harassed by a small, contemptible crusade called “Gamergate”—a campaign of dedicated anti-feminist internet trolls using an ill-informed mob of alienated and resentful video ...

Homophobia, racism, classism, credential boasting, here is a startup that combines all the worst stereotypes about startups:

Ajay flashed a grin and we shook hands and sat down. He asked me to describe myself and I gave him a practiced elevator pitch of my background and experience. He nodded and quickly took over the conversation.

“So, as you might already know, I started this company while I was getting my MBA at Harvard. Before this, I worked for McKinsey & Company…” ...

Here’s the problem. Every venture capitalist, in every interview they’ve ever done will tell you the same casual lie: That they invest in people first and ideas second. They’ll tell you they invest only in people they’d want to work with. They’ll tell you that they have the luxury to say no to companies that don’t do things in line with the way they like to work, the way they like to treat people.

Between 90 and 95 per cent of all criminal convictions in the US result from guilty pleas rather than jury trials. In many if not all of the millions of cases in the US criminal justice system, courts determine punishments in part based on their sense of whether the offender is remorseful or not. We might wince at the idea of secular states engaging in the ‘soul crafting’ of the original penitentiaries, but we still expect state agents to divine ...

I’ve often thought it would be fun to be in a documentary about what I do (and the guys at 37 Signals are doing this now with their own business) but I’m puzzled how one can do an unrelated show while still staying dedicated to one’s day job:

Jennifer “Jenny” Terrell is set to star in “Private Lives of Nashville Wives,” basically “The Real Housewives of Atlanta,” only on a worse network (TNT) and with a worse destiny (swift cancellation). ...

If your job is to make predictions about the future, and all of your predictions are wrong, then you should lose your job. But if you are a defense attorney, and you know your client is guilty, you still have a moral obligation to mount the most rigorous defense possible. Into which of these 2 categories do professional economists belong? Clearly, there is no agreement. Some think they are struggling to discover the truth. Others feel they have been hired ...

Eron Gjoni is shockingly irresponsible. He wrote falsehoods that effected the lives of several women, including the journalists trying to cover the story, but he says he has no regrets, and he would do it all again. What a psychopath.

Although violent animosity against women in video games is not even close to a new phenomenon, it didn’t congeal into Gamergate, a coordinated movement with mainstream press attention, until Eron Gjoni, the ex-boyfriend of game developer Zoë Quinn, released a ...

Former Motionloft CEO Jonathan Mills has pled guilty to two counts of wire fraud. The San Francisco entrepreneur, who raised funding from Mark Cuban, was arrested by the FBI in February. He admitted to spending “substantial amounts” of his victims’ money on “vacations and other entertainment,” like that time he hired Grammy-award winner Miguel (above) for a private show and numerous trips to Vegas.

There’s something in this. Narcissism pays both across the wage distribution – because men who spend lots of time in front of the mirror earn more – and in the boardroom: narcissistic CEOs are better paid. And way back in 1986, Richard Roll said that value-destroying takeovers were often motivated by hubris (pdf) – though he was only echoing Kenneth Boulding’s warning (pdf) of 20 years earlier, that:

There is a great deal of evidence that almost all organizational structures ...

For those of you who aren’t gamers (or don’t hang out all day on Reddit or Twitter), Gamergate arose after the ex-boyfriend of indie game developer Zoe Quinn accused her of trading sex for positive reviews. Following an ethics investigation by the gaming site Kotaku, these allegations proved to be false. But that hasn’t stopped Quinn and other prominent females in the gaming community from being subjected to rape threats and other horrifically misogynist rhetoric. Gamergate defenders ...

But my objection to the advice that management should not contribute technically is actually deeper than technical conflict resolution. Software is so hard that it becomes like child birth in that we have an overwhelming bias to forget the pain: the second you stop writing software, you start rewriting your own history. So as far as you can remember, it was all pretty straightforward, you always hit your deadlines, etc. And with this, you have started down the ...

A few weeks ago, a client that I worked at laid everybody off and it was brutal, it was cold. They held an all-hands meeting and said, “You’re all fired. There’s no severance, we’re going out of business, there’s no COBRA, there’s no coverage. People that are outside of the state are not eligible for unemployment. You’re just all out in the cold right now.” And a lot of the people that I really like at the company had ...

Several students in different episodes are obsessed with “expressing themselves” instead of following the brief (the job specification). They waste precious time in “creative” noodling instead of actually getting shit done.

Others indulge themselves in childish boredom and rebellion when it comes to the repetition of early stages of learning, instead of committing to the basics with all their hearts.

Several more wield perfectionism as a weapon against their own achievement… a weapon, and ...

I already knew that 1958 marked the beginning of some inflection point, where the wages of young males began to flatline, a fact which brought the Baby Boom to an end. But I am surprised to see that problems in the USA economy were already taking shape as early as 1954:

We all know that Joseph McCarthy’s attack on the labor unions had big political effects, but here we see that it also had big economic effects.

Search for “scrum master certification” on Google and you get an endless sea of results:

“Agile” started with some noble ideals but has since become a bit of a scam, where the scamsters “certify” other people, so they can also become scamsters, and everyone makes huge money talking about theory, but no one has any clue about how to create good software.

If you haven’t heard of Ello before this week, you’re not alone. Just this morning my Facebook timeline blew up with friends offering invite codes for what I assumed was a new Gilt-like shopping site, and what turned out to be a new and friendlier social network, which would allow anyone who wanted to be a part of it be who they wanted to be, complete with the name they’ve chosen for themselves.

Now, this tragic downward spiral is spreading to other Western nations:

Real wages continue to fall in the UK and elsewhere, yet despite this striking feature of the labour market, some commentators anticipate resurgent pay growth in the near future. This column argues that the absence of any improvement in the UK’s productivity performance – together with evidence that nominal wage growth is flatlining and real wage growth ...

I had been reading Nathan Barry’s excellent book Authority and something about it inspired me. I started throwing around ideas, things that I knew well and that weren’t well covered already, and I turned up Stripe. I know Stripe very well having used it for a bunch of projects in the past few years. I also know Rails, using it in most of those projects plus at my day job. I knew for sure that there were things about payment ...

Nega-Brianna
I’m late for a programming meeting with Maria, and don’t have time to be stuck in Boston traffic. So instead of grabbing my car keys, I don black, skin-tight leather armor and leap on my motorcycle. It’s a 2009 Honda CBR600RR in racing red — something straight out of Akira. I’ve leaned into highway turns at 80 mph feeling nothing but speed, the air whipping all around me, and my thighs gripping a 212°F engine for dear life. My emotional ...

After 2 centuries where crime lifted people out of poverty, the USA faces a situation where crime no longer helps people:

Chuck and Mike were criminals: they were complicit in the barbarism of the drug trade. But, in the Mertonian sense, they were also innovators. Goffman describes how they craved success in mainstream society. They tried to get an education and legitimate jobs, only to find themselves thwarted. Selling crack was a business they entered into only because they believed that ...

Uber’s drivers are hemmed in by Uber’s changing terms, feel the need to organize a union:

Kazi drives a Toyota Prius for Uber in Los Angeles. He hates it. He barely makes minimum wage, and his back hurts after long shifts. But every time a passenger asks what it’s like working for Uber, he lies: “It’s like owning my own business; I love it.”

Kazi lies because his job depends on it. After passengers finish a ride, Uber asks them to rate ...

Are these people stupid? Yet another article complaining about low rates. Rates were higher in the 1990s, but we still had the original Internet boom.

Gurley’s thesis isn’t hard to follow: Companies are being rewarded by the market for spending — and losing — huge sums of private capital that they can cheaply and quickly raise given the current investment and equities climate. Or, put another way, investors are giving companies huge sums to burn, because the market is willing to ...

It is sometimes argued that women simply have less time to contribute to Wikipedia, due to family commitments. This is a fallacy. Firstly, the United Nations University survey found that only 33.29% of respondents had a partner, and only 14.72% had children. The difference between readers and contributors was negligible here, and the survey report’s analysis indicated only a minor difference in parenthood percentages for male (15.1%) and female (13.7%) respondents. It is patently obvious that girls and women in ...

What was working at Neumont like with Ned Levine as President? A former student, Jason Aquino, claimed that Levine harassed him and other students at the school. Another student, Ryan Elkins, was “banned” from campus after starting a blog talking about some of his experiences at Neumont. The CollegeTimes team was also bribed and then threatened by Levine as well. Does Mr. Levine maintain a carrot/stick attitude with his employees? What did you witness happen to Kristi Robertson in ...

Nearly every single investor Pando has has asked me how more money or algorithms can scale our company faster. My answer is always: They can’t. It’s just going to take five to ten years of solid work to build the media company we want to build. There is no shortcut.

Further, I’ve been told– again and again– that there is no way to build a huge ad-based business without Huffington Post/BuzzFeed-like page views and scale. I disagree with that one ...

Kreyos’ story is starting to feel as old as time itself. It went live on Indiegogo in June last year, trying to raise $100,000 for what it promised to be the only smartwatch to combine both voice and gesture control. It ended up with 15 times that amount: $1.5m. Its Meteor smartwatch would track sleep, and exercise, and be waterproof. Kreyos promised that it was ready to go straight into production when funding closed in August and would ship ...

“It’s pretty amazing to hold leather that no pig or cow died for,” says Lindy Fishburne, an officer of the Thiel Foundation. She is describing a slightly creepy “biofabricated” product made by a startup the foundation funded with a $350,000 donation. The company, named Modern Meadow, makes leather and, indeed, meat by taking skin or muscle samples from animals via biopsy and then growing them in vitro. Modern Meadow is just one of 19 futuristic startups that have received ...

First the company updated the iCloud website to prevent brute-force attacks, patching a vulnerability that should never have been there in the first place. Now it plans to add more security features to iCloud, allowing it to message people when the service is backed up, passwords are changed, or a new device is used to access the service for the first time, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

In the letter, we learn that Gawker doesn’t want to have to post the notice in its offices, on the basis that it no longer employs unpaid interns. But, as the plaintiffs point out, several of Gawker’s current staffers began their career at the company as unpaid interns, and so would be entitled to join the class.

We also learn that Gawker doesn’t want to allow social media to be used to reach prospective plaintiffs, even though that’s exactly the best ...

4. The frequent source of new leads for targets seems to be newcomers who know somebody they want to hack and have stumbled onto one of the networks offering services via search terms or a forum they frequent. The new contributor will offer up a Facebook profile link, plus as much information as is required by the hacker to break the account, plus possible assistance in getting a RAT installed if required. In exchange the hacker and ripped will ...

1) Poor areas are overrun with corruption and graft. Its very hard to do the right thing, when individuals with power will actively work to put a bribe barrier between you and your work. Its like these individuals smell out good intentions and attempt to tax them for the perceived weak-minded good intentions. An example would be, after my brother created several successful startups using ex-cons, he wanted to turn the program over to the City. He quickly learned ...

Though ignored by the current tech startup scene, there are some huge problems that need to be solved in the USA:

To your left are single mothers, 80% of whom, according to the US Census, are poor or hovering on the nasty edges of working poverty. They are struggling to raise their kids in a country that seems to conspire against any semblance of proper rearing: a lack of flexibility in the workplace; a lack of free or ...

We concede that there is some value to Twitter, but the social musing we did early on no longer fits. My feed (full of people I admire) is mostly just a loud, stupid, sad place. Basically: a mirror to the world we made that I don’t want to look into. The common way to refute my complaint is to say that I’m following the wrong people. I think I’m following the right people, I’m just seeing ...

Despite a federal court order directing Microsoft to turn overseas-held email data to federal authorities, the software giant said Friday it will continue to withhold that information as it waits for the case to wind through the appeals process. The judge has now ordered both Microsoft and federal prosecutors to advise her how to proceed by next Friday, September 5.

Let there be no doubt that Microsoft’s actions in this controversial case ...

Chattanooga has the largest high-speed internet service in the US, offering customers access to speeds of 1 gigabit per second – about 50 times faster than the US average. The service, provided by municipally owned EPB, has sparked a tech boom in the city and attracted international attention. EPB is now petitioning the FCC to expand its territory. Comcast and others have previously sued unsuccessfully to stop EPB’s fibre optic roll out.

“What if I totally misunderstood?” seems to be the universal question women ask when guys engage in minor sexual harassment of them.

When Jessica Livingston, a co-founder of the influential startup accelerator Y Combinator, arrived at The Wine Room in Palo Alto, Calif., a little early for our meeting, a man who was also waiting outside the wine bar started to chat her up.

He asked what she was doing there all on her own, and whether she was there maybe ...

I am angry with myself for ruining my own chances to launch a successful website, and I am amazed that Bustle is doing well. Bryan Goldberg strikes me as absolutely clueless about women’s issues, yet he’s managed to create a site that gets huge traffic from women.

Do you read Bustle, the website best known in “the culture” as the place whose founder, Bryan Goldberg, uses his female employees’ legs as typing desks? No, me neither. Nonetheless, according to recent ...

Almost a year ago I paid $55 to be an “early backer” of the credit card replacement system, with the promise that I’d be shipped a Coin summer of 2014. As the months went by emails would arrive detailing how Coin worked, how it was made, etc., all with the reminder that soon enough, I’d be receiving my Coin this summer.

Fast forward to this week — everyone who paid to be backer received an email stating that—HOORAY—our Coins would ...

The 126-page lawsuit, filed in Marion County Circuit Court, claims that fraud, lying and “a pattern of racketeering” by Oracle cost the state and its Cover Oregon program hundreds of millions of dollars.

“Not only were Oracle’s claims lies, Oracle’s work was abysmal,” the lawsuit said. Oregon paid Oracle about $240.3 million for a system that never worked, the suit said.

Oracle issued a statement saying the suit “is a desperate attempt to deflect blame from Cover Oregon and the governor for ...

Go find a story published a few years ago in The New Yorker, perhaps America’s most tightly edited magazine. Give that story to an editor, and tell him it’s a draft. I guarantee you that that editor will take that story—well-polished diamond that it presumably is—and suggest a host of changes. Rewrite the story to the specifications of the new editor. Then take it to another editor, and repeat the process. You will find, once again, that the ...

Working at Gawker Media is a dream job for many of the women on staff here at Jezebel. This is a place that takes chances on developing writers, that has always stood behind us no matter what. But it’s time the company had its feet held to the fire.

For months, an individual or individuals has been using anonymous, untraceable burner accounts to post gifs of violent pornography in the discussion section of stories ...

Adults with a loose claim to self-sufficiency can still recite the cost of their monthly rent, their cable bill, student loan bills, smartphone bill, auto insurance, the seasonal range of electricity consumption, annual penalty for breeding, etc. When charges are deducted automatically, the numbers get fuzzier. For the spendthrift, monthly expenditures on food, drink, travel, and clothing are more nebulous still. But impulse-driven, one-press smartphone purchases are the easiest to lose track of, which makes apps even worse enablers ...

Uber and Lyft are doing everything they can to recruit new drivers. There’s cash and perks and a bevy of enticing benefits, but for whatever reason they’re not mentioning the massive amount of spontaneous sex drivers are having with riders. …If you’re thinking this is all just an elaborate hoax by a spate of sexually frustrated Whisper users, we did too – and then we talked to the company. Whisper was able to weed ...

Something I need to do, that I’ve wanted to do for awhile, is add more checks to my payments systems.

You can make an API call to check the status of a transaction very easily.
When my users are redirected back to my site (thanks page, or similar), I check if their transaction is completed, if not, I kick off an every-five-seconds check while asking the user to hold on while we talk with paypal. I will eventually fail after some number ...

You’re complaining about George doing other things than writing the books you want to read as if your buying the first book in the series was a contract with him: that you would pay over your ten dollars, and George for his part would spend every waking hour until the series was done, writing the rest of the books for you. No such contract existed. You were paying your ten dollars for the book you were reading, ...

Our sales were growing so fast that the biggest problem that we faced was that we literally could not handle all the customers that wanted to sign up for Loudcloud. To combat this and enable us to grow, I worked diligently with my team to plan all the activities that we needed to accomplish to expand our capacity and capture the market before the competition. Next, I assigned sub-goals and activities to each functional head. In conjunction with my leadership ...

I have a novel I’d like to publish, so e-books are interesting to me. Apparently it is really easy to publish them through Amazon, and Amazon let’s you keep 70% of the money, which seems like a good deal.

The state of the book is in constant danger. The novel is constantly dying, and there is a fear that the publishing industry in general is maybe doomed. But if there’s one sector of the publishing industry that’s alive and well, ...

At the time of the sale to Bezos, Donald Graham, Weymouth’s uncle and the chairman of The Washington Post Company, explained that he and his niece felt unsure of the direction in which to take the paper, or how to reverse years of declining revenues. He had approached Bezos as a buyer, he said, because the billionaire could offer deep pockets, a digital brain, and, between the two, a way forward.

Amazon.com started in 1995. At the time, it was a tiny startup. But it now has the power to destroy hundreds of companies that have existed since the 1800s. How is that those venerable firms, with their wealth and connections and political power and their capital, have not been able to build something to compete with Amazon? They have now had 19 years to respond to Amazon, and they have failed to respond for 19 years. Why?

Basically we all knew Google was a company so we shouldn’t be surprised that they went funny. But the change hurt. A company that had previously offered services for the good of their users now started shearing their customers like sheep. I won’t say they fleeced us exactly, because they never exacted any money from us directly, but they started selling us to their advertisers. Someone said, ...

It isn’t easy, of course. In 2013, Randall Lewis of Google and Justin Rao of Microsoft released the paper “On the Near Impossibility of Measuring the Returns on Advertising.” In it, they analyzed the results of 25 different field experiments involving digital ad campaigns, most of which reached more than 1 million unique viewers. The gist: Consumer behavior is so erratic that even in a giant, careful trial, it’s devilishly difficult to arrive at a useful conclusion about whether ...

The pivot used to be the exception. For example, a company starts out selling PEZ dispensers online and later pivots to become eBay. You didn’t hear about all of the companies that failed so the pivot stories probably sounded more prevalent than they were. It’s similar to how a story of one shark attack makes you think there’s a Great White under every surfboard. The human brain assumes that whatever it hears most frequently must be the best reflection of ...

The idea of progress—the notion that human history is the history of human betterment—dominated the world view of the West between the Enlightenment and the First World War. It had critics from the start, and, in the last century, even people who cherish the idea of progress, and point to improvements like the eradication of contagious diseases and the education of girls, have been hard-pressed to hold on to it while reckoning with two World Wars, the Holocaust and Hiroshima, ...

Internet advertising has been the fastest growing advertising channel in recent years with paid search ads comprising the bulk of this revenue. We present results from a series of large scale field experiments done at eBay that were designed to measure the causal effectiveness of paid search ads. Because search clicks and purchase behavior are correlated, we show that returns from paid search are a fraction of conventional non-experimental estimates. As an extreme case, we show that brand-keyword ads ...

In logarithmic domains, two mindsets are important. In the beginning, high-growth phase, the emphasis needs to be on maintaining long-term habits. Since growth is fast initially, care needs to be taken so that it won’t slide back down once effort is removed.
In the later, low-growth phase, the emphasis needs to be on habit breaking. Since low-growth is often caused by calcifying routines, deliberate effort needs to be taken to break out of that comfort zone.
In exponential domains, the mindset ...

This essay is a bit harsh on the publishers, and it also ignores the fact that the publishers are responding rationally to the one strength they still have:

This is the true tragedy of modern “publishers”: that as the world has become able to do the job that once only they could do, they’ve not stepped graciously aside, but devoted their energies to preventing works being available. The publishers’ outdated business model forces them to act in a way directly opposed ...

EK: This seems really at odd with finance’s vision of itself as a world of capitalist cowboys.

KR: We think of Wall Street as being full of these crazy risk takers. But in a lot of schools it’s these scared organization kids going to Wall Street. One thing Wall Street does that’s really smart is they actually tell you way earlier than other industries if you got a job. They’ll let you lock the job down in the fall of ...

It appears that Violet Blue’s works were systematically removed from Boing Boing’s archives. This was no mistake. So while BB would seem to be a great symbol of the blog revolution—that dreamy ideal of everyone in the world freely expressing themselves to all, with no corporate filter—they’re also just another in an endless line of quirky media startups that found success, and then started acting just like the big establishment players to which they were ...

This strikes me as trade-off between short-term and long-term benefits. We can say that the biosphere of the earth is diverse, and that is good, so when the dinosaurs went extinct the mammals were ready to step in and run things. And we often do say that competition in the economy is good, such that when one company goes bankrupt, another company, with a different approach, is ready to step in. So in what sense can we say that diversity ...

Firms almost never have enough data to justify their belief that ads work:

Classical theories assume the firm has access to reliable signals to measure the causal impact of choice variables on profit. For advertising expenditure we show, using twenty-five online field experiments with major U.S. retailers and brokerages ($2.8 million expenditure), that this assumption typically does not hold. Evidence from the randomized trials is very weak because individual-level sales are incredibly volatile relative to the per capita cost of a ...

I assume that coming out is getting easier as more people do it, but Ellen Page emphasizes that it is still hard and it still has a big, negative impact on one’s career:

Page has made just two public appearances since her announcement — presenting an award to transgender Orange Is the New Black star Laverne Cox at the GLAAD Media Awards on April 12 and introducing an X-Men clip at the MTV Movie Awards the following night. Shooting a ...

Comic books with superheroes, as a genre, peaked in the 1940s and have since declined. When I was a kid in the 1970s, comic books were very uncool (you did not want other kids at school knowing that you read them) but you could still get them at any convenience or bookstore that sold magazines. This was an era when Marvel comics cut the writers and artists in on a percentage, and so John Bryne and Chris Claremont got fairly ...

Facebook is very young to find itself in the position where it has to buy innovation from the outside (Instagram, Occulus VR). It fails to deliver the key parts of its own ad infrastructure. It is behaving like an old behemoth that has lost touch with the market, like IBM in 1991, or Sun MicroSystems in 2007. And yet, its CEO is young, and the company is young, so what is the problem? How could it lose touch with ...

It works well when the manager is absent or fully trusting the team. One of the main selling point of Fred Anarchy was the lack of managers in the picture. Well, some sort of business owner, idea creator still needs to be present. That person needs to fully trust the team, ideally needs to be an ex-developer. I never seen in my life a manager without a past in developing software that can trust and understand ...

The publishing platform that carried us into the mobile Internet age is receding. Its influence on publishing will remain, but the platform’s place in Internet culture is changing in a way that feels irreversible and echoes the tradition of AIM and pre-2005 blogging. A lot of this argument comes down to what we feel. Communities can’t be fully measured by how many people are in them. So as we suss out cultural changes, relying on first-hand experience is a first ...

What’s more, The Verge is not alone in this practice. Re/code, a tech site run by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, the longtime Wall Street Journal tech columnist, also won’t share traffic stats with writers. MIT Technology Review holds numbers back too.

“We used to show the writers and editors traffic, and told them to grow it; but it had the wrong effect. So we stopped,“ says Jason Pontin, CEO, editor in chief and publisher of MIT Technology Review. ”The ...

At a time when Silicon Valley is facing increasing scrutiny over the treatment of women in technology, there emerges a website called Codebabes.com that, as you may have already heard, involves women stripping as you learn to code and pass online tests. Seriously.

People have tried it and posted their results.

To which I have to say only this: What in the actual f@ck?

The site is so over-the-top about its soft-core “edu-tainment” offerings that some press outlets have even speculated that ...

This is why you should not spend money on marketing: all of your money should go to improving the product till it reaches the point that your customers are in love with you. The overwhelming majority of money spent on marketing is wasted. The money would be better spent making your product better. The response that Snapchat got is the response every company should strive for.

The level of interest app-makers can command for adding new features is usually limited ...

Sad, and like the end of any large firm, very confusing. Why were they unable compete with Apple? Why did they do so well for so long, and then suddenly they could not?

On April 25, that Nokia ceases to exist, and in its place are two companies that officially have nothing to do with each other: Microsoft Mobile Oy (where the heart of the company will go) and Nokia Oyj (where I will be).

There’s a vast amount of value waiting to be unlocked in Silicon Valley, and it’s not hiding under the Tahoe hills in veins of silver like the Comstock lode. Today’s new billions are no longer dug out of the ground, they’re realized by viewing the world in a different way; seeing things differently to other people and capitalizing on opportunity by investing ahead of the curve. That’s how money is made in Silicon Valley. Strange, then, in a world ...

Despite considerable rhetoric about “free markets” the USA tends to allow anti-competitive combinations of corporations, while taking violent action against any combination of workers.

The miners at first thought the Guard was sent to protect them, and greeted its arrival with flags and cheers. They soon found out the Guard was there to destroy the strike. The Guard brought strikebreakers in under cover of night, not telling them there was a strike. Guardsmen beat miners, arrested them by the hundreds, ...

It’s worth noting that this ~$40B is just for broadcast TV ads. This excludes cable TV ads (~$30B) and subscription TV fees (~$80B). There is an ongoing non-zero sum shift in attention and dollars to online, but TV is far from dead.

I have already mentioned that, like Chris Bertram, I am nostalgic for the early blogosphere, which died out somewhere between 2005 and 2010. I think the world lost something important then. But perhaps there is Blogosphere 2.0 taking shape around the new mega-sites?

4. Wonkery creates astonishing loyalty.
In an age where Facebook is everybody’s homepage, consumers of news have never been more promiscuous in their reading affections. They go wherever they’re sent; no one treats websites like they would a ...

Gruber:
“…I’m offended on two levels here. I’m offended because I believe we can help poor people get health insurance, but I’m almost more offended there’s a principle of political economy that basically, if you’d told me, when the Supreme Court decision came down, I said, ‘It’s not a big deal. What state would turn down free money from the federal government to cover their poorest citizens?’ The fact that half the states are is such a massive rejection of ...

I was late to join Facebook and I was early to quit. I think I joined in 2009 or early 2010, and then I quit in late 2011. I have been a huge skeptic of social media, though this month I have become a fan of Twitter.

The rage in the comments is interesting:

Lady Di:

I started noticing how bad I felt after logging into FB a few years ago… Yes it is a time suck. And everyone is ...

Consider the following scenario:
The leadership at Company X announces a partial restructuring that will consolidate two levels of management, effectively demoting all Senior Managers to the position of Manager. The change management team sets to work: it identifies sponsors; conducts a change readiness assessment; develops and executes a change management plan that dedicates resources and time to manage communications, training, coaching, and resistance; and supports the project team through the roll out of the new org. chart by training ...

Ms. Glen, in a statement, called the tech industry “our pipeline to the middle class” and added, “It’s our job to develop the work force these fast-growing companies need so people from our schools and our neighborhoods have a real shot at these good-paying jobs.”

At least one other city official appears to share that view: The report was managed by Carl Weisbrod before he left HR&A, a real estate consulting firm, to accept Mr. de Blasio’s appointment as chairman of ...

These are some serious cost overruns. $40 million is the estimate, $500 million is the final cost. And $5 billion for the overall 360 development. Consider that all Apollo missions from 1960 to 1975 collectively costs $25 billion, and no one trip to the moon cost anything like $5 billion.

IBM built its own circuits for S/360, Solid Logic Technology (SLT) – a set of transistors and diodes mounted on a circuit twenty-eight-thousandths of a square inch and protected by ...

In the meantime, one the most interesting misconceptions I’ve heard about the ‘Techtopus‘ conspiracy is that, while these secret deals to fix recruiting were bad (and illegal), they were also needed to protect innovation by keeping teams together while avoiding spiraling costs.

That was said to me, almost verbatim, over dinner by an industry insider, who quickly understood he’d said something wrong— “But of course, it’s illegal, so it’s wrong,” he corrected himself.

There is a large gap between spoken and written language, in particular, spoken language has an abundance of half sentences that never finish. Most quotes in newspapers clean up the grammar that the person used when speaking. So I like this, as it goes against the grain:

“I don’t understand what they were thinking to begin with. I’m sorry, I don’t even like to take my kids in a car ride that would be too dangerous, and it’s like taking ...

The convergence of digital trends along with the rise of China and globalization has upended the rules for almost every business in every corner of the globe. It’s worth noting that everything from the Internet, to electric cars, genomic sequencing, mobile apps, and social media — were pioneered by startups, not existing companies.
Perhaps that’s because where established companies might see risks or threats, startups see opportunity. As the venture capital business has come roaring back in the last 5 ...

Richard Francis worked at Intel and got to know Apple employees when the two companies partnered on projects.

“There is a fairly heavy corporate controlling hand governing a lot of what Apple locally can / can’t ‘do’ as a business. That made for a fair degree of tension with some senior staff coming in from other parts of the technology industry.”

Did Carr have a choice? Was he truly beholden to his shareholders’ desire to take the deal? If not, how can directors act against the wishes of shareholders to preserve value for other stakeholders—value that is often less easily measured than a buyout price? In the wake of the scandals that caused the recession, the management world has been immersed in trying to answer such questions.

Oddly, no previous management research has looked at what the legal literature says about the ...

Everyone who wants to be an entrepreneur should read Steve Blank’s book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany. But be aware that the era when this book was relevant is coming to an end, due to the high speed of innovation in some sectors:

This possibility allows the world to turn on its head very quickly, for Instagram to create a $1B company in 18 months with 30M users and for Whatsapp to amass a rabidly engaged mobile user base ...

The implication is that Hacker News is dominant because the competition is weak, and there is some truth to that, mostly because Hacker News does not sell ads, whereas all the major tech blogs sell ads, and the ads get in the way of my ability to read the story, and the ads might also influence the editorial policy of the blog, and yet Hacker News has its own editorial policy, influenced by its economic concerns, and less obvious than ...

Much of this thread is devoted to the problems with Facebook advertising. This was one of the few positive stories:

Like others have said, it really depends on what you’re selling and who you’re targetting.
Our example (country specific mobile app for doctors), spent 100 € on AdWords, end result was literally 0 app installs, 0 sign-ups, 0 everything. Medical keywords are expensive, no chance of sending them directly to the App Store/Play Store (that we saw at least), and no other ...

Mozilla’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples. We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid.

Politics is normally not the business of a website, and we all know there’s a lot more wrong with the world than misguided CEOs. So you might wonder why we’re asserting ourselves today. This is why: we’ve devoted the last ...

I built a custom CRM for the private club Parlor New York, and I just discovered an article about their original application. The application has changed a lot in the last 3 years. It is now focused on more detailed questions that try to figure out what your profession is. For me, this is one more data point about how ideas change once you try to make them real.

For reference: Here are changes in hourly real wages of men, 1973-2012, at different percentiles of the wage distribution, calculated from Census data by the Economic Policy Institute. As you can see, wages have fallen for 60 percent of men.

The IRS now treats bitcoin as a property asset, very much the same way they treat stocks, and not all stocks are prone to speculation. So this is expected news for those who hold bitcoin as an investment.

The major impact of this decision will be on consumer adoption. Now, every time I want to make a transaction, I need to keep track of my taxes. I know that some startups are already developing ways to ...

This is a curious story, for sure. If the half the Board hates the new CEO, then how did he become CEO? Brendan Eich is apparently a homophobe, having donated money to Proposition 8. I understand why the Board members would resign, but why were they unable to stop the appointment?

An interesting look at the extent to which the investors/angels in Silicon Valley help promote stereotypes that in turn promote a backwards view of gender relations:

Silicon Valley fetishizes a particular type of engineer — young, male, awkward, unattached. This fetish is so normalized in startup culture that it often goes unseen for what it is: the specific, narrow fantasy of venture capitalists, deployed to focus their investment and attention. The disproportionate success of a very few individuals who fit this ...

I suspect this story will be one of those stories that we will talk about for many years, sort of in the same way some of us still reference the treatment that Blaine Cook got in the media, and how unfair it was to blame him for the technical problems in Rails, at a site that was growing 1,000% a year. Some stories reveal a lot about the mood of the tech community in a given year. The Blaine Cook ...

Our commitment to explaining the news is a commitment to an outcome not a commitment to any particular article format. We do think, however, that the traditional article format is ripe for reinvention.

In journalism, you’ll sometimes hear articles about hard topics referred to as “vegetables” or “the spinach” — the idea being that readers don’t like those subjects but they should be reading about them anyway. Our ...

How long does this go on? Tens of millions of dollars get traded in virtual currencies, yet the exchanges seem to be slapped together by amateurs, with none of the caution that a bank would use when building its exchange software.

Vircurex had a computer programming bug that caused the loss of a huge amount of virtual currency, so they are now insolvent, and they are trying to offer their own solvency-resque, without going to the courts:

Sam Altman seems serious about making it easier for female founders to find resources through the VC and incubator systems:

I realize it’s always a bit ridiculous for a guy to talk about what it’s like for female founders, but I’m interested in doing whatever I can to help, because the venture business has definitely been unfair to women. The women on our team also care deeply about this issue, and in fact can probably do more than I can ...

City officials estimate that there are over 40,000 illegal in-law units attached to San Francisco properties, and they account for about ten percent of the city’s housing stock. Most of these units were constructed during World War II, when workers flooded to the Bay Area to take wartime industrial jobs; today, property owners often choose to rent them to lower-income tenants under the table. Historically, San Francisco has had a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding illegal in-law units; ...

I have seen $1 million dollars wasted in what turned out to be a year long brainstorming session. I have seen self-doubts rationalized as doubts about a product, and honest doubts about a product transformed into tests of personal self-worth. I have seen smart people lose their bearings when they face the test of the market. Startups are hard, and the public’s reaction to your product is always personal.

Pasha Galbreath and I continue to give talks to first-time entrepreneurs ...

Maybe it is the Europeans who do the right thing, and the Americans who get it wrong?

A Spanish cable company, ONO, built originally by Eugenio Galdon and mostly by my friend Richard Alden between 2001 and 2011, is in the process of being sold to Vodafone for around $9.5bn, and nobody cares. It is sad how entrepreneurial successes that don’t happen in the USA or are not related to the USA get so little press. ONO is a fantastic story ...

I’m actually shocked that Mt. Gox did not lose money to a database screwup. There are so many flawed NoSQL databases out there that, if you adopt the technologies advertised as “hip” on techcrunch, you’ll most likely end up with a broken exchange (more on this in subsequent blog posts, because there are many funny examples that deserve their own discussion). It is quite easy for well-meaning developers to build an exchange on a database that loses transactions, or to ...

Like Chris Bertram, I have a certain nostalgia for the world of blogging that existed during the years, roughly, 2000-2008. I sad that the conversational aspects have moved to Twitter, and now the blogs are mostly op-eds, rather than conversations. I am also surprised to see it now being treated as something to be done formally.

To be fair, may of the new initiatives, such as The Conversation, Politics in Spires, and the LSE Blogs are great, content-wise. But they ...

Sadly, Mr Rooney did not respond in the manner of one of his celebrated predecessors. But he should have, because the chant is wrong. Mr Rooney is not getting £300,000 a week because he is unusually greedy: in the improbable event of being offered such money, who among us would turn it down? He is getting it because he is unusually powerful – a power which is not entirely due merely to his exceptional skill.

$110 billion just from state and local governments. And of course the Federal government adds in a lot more.

State and local governments have awarded at least $110 billion in taxpayer subsidies to business, with 3 of every 4 dollars going to fewer than 1,000 big corporations, the most thorough analysis to date of corporate welfare revealed today.

Rarely does one see such blatant lying. Here a group of economists post a graph that very clearly contradicts everything they say, yet they go ahead and say it anyway.

The authors conclude that “rising assortative mating together with increasing labour-force participation by married women [emphasis added by me] are important in order to account for the determinants of growth in household income inequality in the US.” So, right out of the gate, a key influence not trumpeted in the headline ...

I am intrigued by a Paul Krugman post in which talks about policy mattering.

Change the word “policy” to “technology” and this gets at my complaint about many of the tech disasters I’ve seen in recent years, from the companies I worked for, to stuff I read about such as the roll out of the website for Obamacare.

This blog post is way too long, but it does raise an interesting question. Hollywood tends to focus on conventional sexuality, mostly the struggle to establish a monogamous relationship between 2 heterosexual people, though lately there has been more portrayals of homosexuality. There are also portrayals of promiscuity, but never as anything positive. However, the gaming industry is more comfortable with scenarios that involve polyamorous relationships. Why do the 2 industries portray sexuality so differently?

The original blogosphere was commercialized, to such an extent that it has almost wholly disappeared. In some ways, this is a great success, in other ways it is a great failure. I miss the blogosphere that existed from 2000 to 2007. This sums it up well:

A personal blog, a blog that is really your own, and not a channel of the The Daily Beast or Forbes or The Washington Post or what have you, is an iterated game with ...

Over the next decade, we realized life wasn’t quite as easy as we thought. Though my wife was slowly moving herself into positions of higher pay and responsibility, I couldn’t find a teaching job and had to rely on bartending. I eventually traded bartending in for some entry-level sales opportunities. I heard a person could make a decent coin in sales. If you can sell stuff, that is. Not just if you work hard.

Part of the magic of a startup is the fear of death. You have only so much money in the bank, and if you don’t get to the right milestone before you run out, then you’re dead—company goes under, it’s over. There’s a way to cheat death when you are not going to make it—you sound the alarm and force everyone to code through the night and/or weekend. This is stereotypically the life one signs up for at an early ...

These pressures form part of the darker side of startups, along with concerns that startup communities, though very international, are made up largely of youngish white males who are not so much entrepreneurs as new kinds of workers. A further worry is that software—and hence startups—are eating not just the world but jobs, too.

Ask founders why they put up with the hardships, and they reply with predictable enthusiasm. “I want to change the world,” says Daan Weddepohl, chief executive of ...

A Reddit user named OKCThrowaway22221 shared a pretty spectacular tale of his adventures in online dating while pretending to be a woman, and we need to talk about it.

So, this happened:
Last night I was bored and was talking with a friend on skype about her experiences with online dating. I was joking with her that “girls have it easy on dating sites” etc. etc. I had never really done anything in the online dating world but I had set up ...

There are only two kinds of people who are successful at this social media thing. Those who are funny and those who get real. I am not that funny, and I have yet to get real publicly.

Today is a good day to change that. Since funny is not an option, I am going to take a deep breath, muster up all the courage I can, and talk about an issue I have long observed despairingly from the sidelines.

According to the study the *number of women in IT-related positions dropped by 20% in the last decade. This in light of the fact that women in other traditionally male professions are either holding their numbers, or actually increasing their levels of participation.

Most of the decrease came from administrative ranks, which means that women are not moving into management positions in the tech industry, or if they are, they’re not staying. Outside of the administrative ranks, women hold ...

Since 2006 C-Heads Magazine shows a snapshot of youth culture, bringing together only the most talented people.
In print and online the Vienna / Berlin based magazine shows the full creative range out of photography, fashion, music, art and culture.
Explore exclusive editorials and the best of designers, stylists, musicians and writers from different parts of the world,
who merge to feed our 300,000 readers with amazing talent, latest trends and inspiration.

I only just now discovered Issuu which looks like a clever idea. I think the magazines uploaded to it are all originally designed for print. You can sign up and create an account and “subscribe” to the various magazines. The graphic layout is a strong reminder of everything that is wrong with web graphics.

But it’s not like Larry Page and Sergey Brin ever lived on a commune. They came along long after the counterculture. How do you draw that connection?

One of the great mistakes people made in reviewing my book was to say, “Wow, it’s great. Turner finally showed us how the hippies brought us computing.” Nothing could be further from the truth. What I think I did in the book was actually show how the research world that brought us computing also ...

The safe (simple agreement for future equity) is intended to replace convertible notes in most cases, and we think it addresses many of the problems with convertible notes while preserving their flexibility. In addition to being simpler and clearer, we intend the safe to remain fair to both investors and founders.
During its development the safe was positively reviewed by many of the top startup investors. We believe it’s a positive evolution of the convertible note and hope the startup community ...

Along with the theory that most entrepreneurs start off breaking the rules, and only later, if they are successful, do they turn their operation into something legitimate:

The Man Who Does Not Exist insisted on anonymity in exchange for sharing his story. He considers himself a New York entrepreneur who wants to make a buck and doesn’t have much patience for what he views as arbitrary rules and regulations, such as those that govern renting apartments to Airbnb subscribers. He’s ...

I think I am alone in this, but I would be happy to stick to Netflix’s DVD service. But I have a lot of friends who use it mostly for its streaming service. I think the adage “Never underestimate Netflix” remains a good one: despite the huge challenges facing the media landscape, Netflix keeps winning. This is interesting:

2013 seems to have been a good year for games, but a bad one for gamers: a blur of angry adolescent guys reminding women just who is the boss in game culture. Wu recounts a number of the year’s worst examples, and they’re surprisingly grotesque.

That said, a bravo must go out to one of the more prominent contributors to the bullying tenor of game culture, Mike Krahulik, who today recognized his problem and promised to deal with it.

I personally feel qualified to take on the title of “hacker” because of my early in life and broad experiences with programming, but simultaneously feel that I’ll never truly be one because I don’t fit the stereotype and am okay with that: I wear dresses and heels instead of hoodies and sneakers, I keep a regular sleep schedule, and most of all, I’m not male. I feel like I might be earning extra respect because of my extra years of ...

She had what she calls “moments of being dead” during the ambulance trip to the hospital, but was revived and reassembled in the first of what would be more than 100 operations.

“I still carry around all the rosaries that people put on the hospital bed,” she says. Pierson did not actually see any of those visitors, having been in a drug-induced coma for 18 months. When she woke up, she was blind, bald and, at 64 pounds, had lost nearly ...

Paul asks “God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls interested in computers?” and that is a damn good question and one that I have been thinking about a lot over the past four years. We see very few women entrepreneurs walk into USV and that is disappointing to me. And I agree with Paul that one of the issues (but by no means the only issue) causing this gap, is that young women are not ...

Beitz is a co-author of “Social Bullying in Nursing Academia,” an article published in the September/October 2013 edition of Nurse Educator that draws upon interviews conducted with 16 nursing professors who were the victims of social bullying in an academic nursing workplace. Beitz says that the participants described in detail instances in which they were slandered, isolated, physically threatened, lied to, or given unrealistic workloads, among various other bullying tactics.
The participants in the study were primarily non-tenured female ...

Why You’re Not Watching Keeping Up With the Kardashians Anymore. This is an interesting take on how things are changing:

The problem is, like many reality stars before them, the Kardashians have become many times more famous than their so-called docudrama. Unlike many such reality stars before them, they’re able to docu their own drama in real time, 24/7, on a range of platforms that actually outnumbers the Kardashians themselves (most of us were just getting the hang of Facebook when ...

The big media event today is Beyonce’s new video. So of course, the server is down? The error is a WordPress error. When do media people learn how to use software and servers to handle big spikes in traffic?

Back in the mid-1990s, I did a lot of web work for traditional media. That often meant figuring out what the client was already doing on the web, and how it was going, so I’d find the techies in the company, and ask them what they were doing, and how it was going. Then I’d tell management what I’d learned. This always struck me as a waste of my time and their money; I was like an overpaid bike messenger, ...

Every now and again, I see a business doing something so sensible and so radical at the same time that I realize I’m seeing a little piece of the future. I had that feeling last week, after visiting my friend Scott Heiferman at Meetup.

On my way out after a meeting, Scott pulled me into a room by the elevators, where a couple of product people were watching a live webcam feed ...

The sad and remarkable thing that we’ve learned over the past year or so is how little intellectual debate matters. On both fiscal austerity and monetary policy, the PREs (Perfectly Reasonable Economists) have completely blown the VSPs (Very Serious People) out of the water — the inflationistas, the expansionary austerians, the 90-percent threshold of doom people have all seen their claims collapse in the face of evidence. Yet policy barely changes, and the VSPs continue to talk as if ...

This fellow finds a very good quote where Paul Krugman defends himself as an establishment economist. We should all wonder: if the year was 1968, would Paul Krugman be considered left-of-center or right-of-center?

I like to think that I am more open-minded about alternative approaches to economics than most, but I am basically a maximization-and-equilibrium kind of guy. Indeed, I am quite fanatical about defending the relevance of standard economic models in many situations.

Even many retired Navy officers say they have been shocked by how chummy some of the officers charged in the case had become with Mr. Francis, calling him Big Bro and Boss in emails and promising to “work your business plan” within the Navy bureaucracy.

“This kind of malfeasance in basically working for someone else is kind of unheard-of among line officers, except in cases where someone was spying for a foreign power,” said Kevin Eyer, a retired Navy captain ...

Luck helps determine how much human capital we acquire in the first place. I’m thinking of several mechanisms here:

– When you were born. Rick was lucky enough to be born near enough to the computer age.Had he been born a few decades earlier, he’d never have unleashed his writing “talent.**” This point extends. In the 50s, only a few people could get to university. Now, many more can – which gives late developers especially more advantage. (It is ...

Most people know that the general trend in the dollar’s role as an international currency has been slowly downward since 1976. International use of the dollar as a currency in which to hold foreign exchange reserves, to denominate financial transactions, to invoice trade, and to serve as a vehicle for foreign exchange transactions is below where it was during the heyday of the Bretton Woods era (1945-1971).
But few are aware of what the most recent numbers show.
...

Ran out of money. Ran out of credit. Losing house in two months (already foreclosed). Wife pregnant. Three kids all under 6. Pretty sure I am the opposite of everyone here. I am no man. Just a statistic. Everything is gone. Selling spare parts to keep the lights on. It was a nice fantasy, HN. To the rest of you: fight hard and good luck.

I tried to follow all the good advice successful entrepreneurs gave when explaining their accomplishments.

For example I started writing a blog. Some say content marketing is a key to success – to create a community that would be useful once the product is released. I also started looking at methodologies like Lean Startup. I released fast and failed fast. I went to startup events to find a co-founder because they said that it’s mandatory if you want to succeed ...

I am part of many Meetup groups. This was just posted to a tech Meetup. I am removing the name and reposting it here. (This person’s name is one that I would associate with China.) They are now in New York. I think it is sad they have 100k in student debt, but they can only get a below average job.

Hello everyone,

My name [person's name]. I am sorry to bother you. I have start join [name of tech Meetup] ...

The TV business is having its worst year ever.
Audience ratings have collapsed: Aside from a brief respite during the Olympics, there has been only negative ratings growth on broadcast and cable TV since September 2011, according to Citi Research.

Media stock analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson recently noted, “The pay-TV industry has reported its worst 12-month stretch ever.” All the major TV providers lost a collective 113,000 subscribers in Q3 2013. That doesn’t sound like a huge deal — but ...

This is a powerful and important work, but even so, I can’t help but think that it has arrived very late in the day. Ask yourself: how many books have been published describing the destruction of the postwar middle-class economic order and the advent of the shiny, plutocratized new one? Well, since I myself started writing about the subject in the mid-1990s—and thus earned a place on every book publicist’s mailing list—there have been at least a thousand, not counting ...

To measure such management practices, we adapt the methodology set out in Nick Bloom and John Van Reenen’s pioneering work (Bloom and Van Reenen 2007, 2010). Earlier Vox columns have described the impact of management practices on explaining cross-country productivity differences in private sector firms, and on firm behaviour in developing countries. We adapt this method to measure management practices for bureaucrats in Nigeria, and then link these multiple dimensions of management to the quantity and quality of public services ...

Then he found my Yemeni visa. He put my passport down and stared at me.

“What the hell were you doing in Yemen?”

“I went to the island Socotra, it’s not on mainland Yemen. It’s a small island closer to Somalia. A very special place, some call it ‘Galapagos of the Middle East.’ I think 85 percent of the plants and animals there, are indigenous.”

“Weren’t you scared?”

“Yeah. I was scared. When I was at the airport in mainland Yemen. That entire ...

I am feeling somewhat justified in having been extremely skeptical, since the 1990s:

I became such an enthusiast of the new investing culture that I wrote my first book, in the mid-1990s, about what I called “the democratization of money.” It was only right, I argued, that the little guy have the same access to the markets as the wealthy. In the book, I didn’t make much of the decline of pensions. After all, we were in the middle of the ...

Interesting. This is the first time in history that the reputation of the President Of The United States has been affected by a website. And I have known many clients who feel “mad, frustrated and angry” because they don’t understand why the website is taking so long, nor do they understand how to manage a software project so it is done on time.

As the story of the Obamacare website fiasco unfolds, senior administration aides tell me that the President is ...

Google is now adopting Microsoft’s failed policies of directly imitating a competitor, without adding anything new or interesting itself. Instead of doing something wholly new, Google is promoting Google+ as a straight alternative to Facebook. Meanwhile Google has shutdown dozens of innovative services that Google felt were too small. Google has also cut back on the 20% time that engineers could use to come up with something that Google’s competitor’s were not already doing. Larry Page has said he ...

The steady stream of Watergate revelations, President Richard Nixon’s twists and turns to fend off disclosures, the impeachment hearings, and finally an unprecedented resignation—all these riveted the nation’s attention in 1974. Hardly anyone paid attention to a story that seemed no more than a statistical oddity: That year, for the first time since the end of World War II, Americans’ wages declined.

Since 1947, Americans at all points on the economic spectrum had become a little better off with each ...

Leaving aside the large surplus just after World War II, we went from persistent small surpluses before 1980 to persistent large deficits after 1980. This meant that we needed more domestic demand, other things equal, to achieve full employment — and arguably that we needed a series of bubbles and rising leverage, which are no longer forthcoming.

The reason I’m hesitating a bit before simply declaring trade the culprit is the issue of causation, and the related issue of whether those ...

Exactly 10 years before, when Newcastle yachtsman Ivan Macfadyen had sailed exactly the same course from Melbourne to Osaka, all he’d had to do to catch a fish from the ocean between Brisbane and Japan was throw out a baited line.

“There was not one of the 28 days on that portion of the trip when we didn’t catch a good-sized fish to cook up and eat with some rice,” Macfadyen recalled.

How long can the USA remain the world capitol of technical research if the world’s researchers can not meet here for conferences?

Adi Shamir Prevented from Attending Crypto and Cryptology Conferences

“Peter G. Neumann”
Wed, 16 Oct 2013 9:43:36 PDT
Adi Shamir applied for a J1 visa at the beginning of June 2013, two and
one-half months early, so that he could attend the annual Crypto Conference
in Santa Barbara in mid-August (which he has almost always attend for the
past 32 years) and a ...

I agree with SSG Deployed and MAJ TPU on all of their points but there is an even bigger problem lurking.

DEE WILL DIRECTLY CONTRIBUTE TO SECURITY ISSUES!

I have migrated to EE recently and can see that there are several major issues that are going to directly contribute to security issues. The first 2 are issues that will cause users to be unhappy which will cause issue ...

Berlin wants creativity. Has there ever been an era of innovation that was not, also, a period of political change? Eras of technical innovation often come after some political upheaval that opens a door. The English Revolution put in place the civil rights necessary to allow the Agricultural Revolution, and the American Civil War put in place the national market that allowed the Second Industrial Revolution. The great Post War Boom followed World War II. Maybe you could say the ...

I love Berlin. But it is changing. As with New York, it is possible that what made it attractive to artists also started a boom that must eventually make it unattractive to artists. This is similar to what happened to Soho, in New York City, between 1985 and 2005: first the artists move in because rents are low, but the artists drive out the drug dealers and make the place sexy, and then the rich want to move in and ...

How is this even legal? Can you actually lie about who the actress was? You don’t like how a woman is behaving now, so you retroactively remove her name from the movies she starred in? This is the corporate version of The Commissar Vanishes.

This is the last Miley news of today, I promise! Her name has been removed from all Hannah Montana CDs on iTunes and replaced solely with “Hannah Montana.” “See You Again” is now listed as a Hannah ...

I am confused about this warrant. It appears to be a blanket warrant that assumes everyone who uses AirBnB is using it illegally. Surely there must be some people who renting out rooms in their own homes, while they are there, all of which is legal. Since some people are probably using AirBnB legally, the warrant is almost surely unconstitutionally broad. If the government gets all the data then they can assume guilt and gather evidence where they have no ...

This won’t come as a surprise if you’re familiar with the game’s genre, but playing Starcraft 2 might make you smarter. Starcraft 2 is a so-called “real-time strategy game,” a form of video game that involves resource management and military planning in parallel, while restricting the amount of information that each player has.

The result is a gaming experience that involves planning, strategic thinking on the fly, and rapid mental and physical coordination (this is why I’m terrible at Starcraft, if ...

This graph makes it appear that “Judged from a financial perspective, a bachelor’s degree has a positive return on investment that beats the returns of the stock market, corporate bonds, and the housing market.” However, to believe this graph is valid, you have to believe that the income premium (over high school) that college graduates made in the past will continue to be true in the future. To the extent this is true, it might be because of falling wages ...

Throughout history, leaders have found it more convenient to be wrong for the “right” reasons than to be right for the “wrong” reasons. No one criticizes you for subscribing to ideas that are popular and wrong, but god help you if believe something that is unpopular, though true. And thus, failure continues to happen.

That’s for-profit schools, which are suffering in a big way, but in the USA the under 24 population will decline for awhile, and not recover till the year 2030, so higher ed in the USA will struggle for awhile.

Our empirical results show large differences in the gender response to political persuasion strategies. In fact, male and female voters respond in opposite ways to the degree of aggressiveness of the opponent’s campaign.

Negative advertising increases men’s turnout by about eight percentage points, but has no effect on women.
Gender differences are even stronger for electoral choices.

Women vote more for the opponent (by eight points) and less for the incumbent (by eight points) if exposed to the opponent’s positive campaign.
Exactly the opposite ...

However, “Ashton Tate was put on the auction block, and the investment bankers made a very convincing pitch that if we added installed market share to Borland’s superior technology, we could become a leader for enterprise solutions,” Kahn said.
Moreover, the bankers argued that if someone else like Microsoft or Lotus acquired Ashton-Tate, it would make things very difficult for Borland, he said.
“There was a lot of debate within Borland as to whether to acquire dBASE,” Kahn said. “I was ambivalent. ...

To give you an idea of how this happens: when I was in college, I worked at a pizza shop. It was Thursday. I got paid Friday. I thought I had $20 in my bank account, but I didn’t realize that day was the day that my World of Warcraft subscription was up, and that was $15. During the course of the day, I bought lunch, a snack, and some pencils or something. All that total was less than the ...

Not saying this is typical, but here is my experience of Blackberry.
I was in IT support at the time they came out. One of the things I hated about IT support, and I found it common with most colleagues, was the idea that if you are in IT, every thing with a plug or batteries is some how part of an IT person’s skill set. Because we are the clever mysterious people who can fix the server, we must ...

So egregious was the death that the Collin County medical examiner listed the cause of death as “therapeutic misadventure” because the cause of death had been an injured vertebral artery. You just don’t see coroners putting that sort of phrase on a death certificate. In any case, after Kellie Martin’s death, Dr. Duntsch either resigned or was forced out, but there was no black mark on his record. He got privileges at another hospital, Dallas Medical Center. Now look at ...

Interesting, and very sad to think about how much things have gone downhill:

Why didn’t we patent the spreadsheet? Were we stupid?

This is a very common question, since, by the late 1990′s, software inventions were routinely patented. Today, it seems negligent to ignore patents. However, in 1979, when VisiCalc was shown to the public for the first time, patents for software inventions were infrequently granted. Programs were thought to be mere mathematical algorithms, and mathematical algorithms, as laws of nature, were ...

Microsoft Excel is the linchpin of Microsoft Office, the only part of Office that is truly irreplaceable. I wonder what can ever compete with Excel? Interesting:

Excel has developed a reputation of being bloated, slow, error prone and used primarily by “business people” who don’t have real quantitative skills. Just like anything else, Excel is a tool that can be misused but is significantly more useful than people give it credit for. The most important benefit Excel provides is making data ...

Persons per family household:
1990: 3.22
2000: 3.24
2010: 3.24
Not so much change, and if you look you will see there is also not so much change for non-family households. The Census pdf is here. I have covered this ground before, but the myth of “changing household size means economic progress has been just fine” dies hard.
By the way, the average number of people in a household categorized as “living alone” has remained strictly constant at one.
All of this is referring ...

Moderation has always been a hot-button issue on 4chan. “What’s considered ‘on-topic’?”, “How strictly should the rules be enforced?”, et cetera have all been debated for years, but while the questions have remained the same, the 4chan of today is not the 4chan of yesterday.

Last month, 4chan was accessed by 22.5 million unique visitors. For comparison, during that same period five years ago, the site was accessed by 3.2 million unique visitors. Rules 1 and 2 be damned, 4chan has ...

One of the things people often ask me about in regards to software security is “Are there any standards that these people should be following? Any governing bodies? Any recourse for screwing things up?” Ok, that’s three things but you get the idea and people are usually pretty surprised when they learn that for the most part, no. No standards, no governing bodies, no recourse. You can go and create a new website today storing everyone’s credentials in the clear, ...

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble has been vindicated.
For my part, I have been wrong about everything. German discipline policies for the eurozone have been a tremendous success. I am ashamed for suggesting otherwise.
As the wise, patient, and always self-effacing Mr Schäuble writes today in The Financial Times, the Euro-sceptics talk and write relentless drivel.
“Ignore the doomsayers: Europe is being fixed” is the headline:
The eurozone is clearly on the mend both structurally and cyclically.
What is happening ...

For a proud professional like Margaret Mary, this was the last straw; she was mortified. She begged me to call Adult Protective Services and tell them to leave her alone, that she could take care of herself and did not need their help. I agreed to. Sadly, a couple of hours later, she was found on her front lawn, unconscious from a heart attack. She never regained consciousness.

Meanwhile, I called Adult Protective Services right after talking to Margaret Mary, ...

People work hard and save. They hope to get a small piece of property somewhere, or perhaps a lot of property. They pass this property along to their children. The process continues for centuries. Because of this, the last 2 or 3 centuries has seen an increase in the amount of property in the world.

That much makes sense.

What makes less sense is why the ratio of capital to income would change, or why capital values would increase over income. What ...

Surprisingly few people have grasped this process as well as Joyce did. Aristotle pointed out that if the looms wove and the lyres played themselves, we’d need fewer people to do these things. The Luddites, active in 19th-century England, didn’t take the mechanization of textile making lying down. And in 1930, no less an economic sage than John Maynard Keynes fretted about temporary “technological unemployment,” which he feared would grow faster than the number of jobs created by new technologies.

One thing I like about this policy is it removes all kinds of perverse incentives which currently exist.

Some (true) personal examples: a friend of mine is moderately disabled and lives with his elderly parents. He wants (and they desperately want for him) to be able to live independently in a small apartment so that he can develop coping skills which will serve him when they are no longer around. His parents have the means to help him buy an apartment, ...

Another approach that’s often talked about for measuring output is Function Points. I have a little more sympathy for them, but am still unconvinced. This hasn’t been helped by stories I’ve heard of that talk about a single system getting counts that varied by a factor of three from different function point counters using the same system.

Even if we did find an accurate way for function points to determine functionality, I still think we are missing the point of productivity. ...

They say Moritz Erhardt was caught up in what the banking industry calls a “magic roundabout,” in which a taxi drives you home after a 24-hour shift, waits outside while you shower and change, then drives you right back for another daylong stint at the office.

After three days of endless work and six weeks of sometimes 100-hour-or-more work weeks, the 21-year-old German exchange student working a summer gig at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in London collapsed and died in ...

When we feel like we’re good at something, that’s when we can really learn it, sink our teeth in and love it and do it until we’re experts.

It is a great motivator, this feeling of confidence. This belief that we can accomplish what we want to do is called self-efficacy. There are four sources of self-efficacy at a particular task (in order of strength):[1]
doing it
seeing people like me do it
social persuasion
your body
Why aren’t there more women programmers? Because many women ...

There are three popular explanations for the clear under-representation of women in management, namely: (1) they are not capable; (2) they are not interested; (3) they are both interested and capable but unable to break the glass-ceiling: an invisible career barrier, based on prejudiced stereotypes, that prevents women from accessing the ranks of power. Conservatives and chauvinists tend to endorse the first; liberals and feminists prefer the third; and those somewhere in the middle are usually drawn to the second. ...

In a feature for The Magazine, Mr. Bouie examined why the mastheads of tech blogs like The Next Web, The Verge, Engadget and Gizmodo were overwhelmingly white and male. Rather than “overt racism,” he found a prohibitive combination of dependence on unpaid internships–and the network effect of a wired boys club whose members sometimes seem to be talking solely for each other’s benefit.

Technology has become just as pervasive as the Valley had always hoped, Mr. Bouie noted:

A good reminder to me about the importance of users being able to delete their accounts:

After seeing a few tweets about how difficult it can be to delete your Skype account and then hearing that Netflix flat-out won’t delete your details I decided to build JustDelete.me.

JustDelete.Me is a directory of urls to delete your account from web services. (Yes, I am aware how terrible that description is. If you’ve got a better one, let me know). Services are marked either ...

A while back you might have read Y-Combinator’s Paul Grahm calling for entrepreneurs to “Kill Hollywood,” soliciting ideas on how to eat the film industry’s lunch. Coming out following the backlash against the MPAA led bid to pass SOPA, it was a novel war cry but I believe inherently misguided. The arrogance in which the call and the approval that flowed from it through the Hacker News community made pretty clear a fundamental lack of understanding as to what game ...

It boggles my mind, given the big money involved, why so many people continue to bet huge sums of cash on the proven short-term penny-wise/pound-foolish idiocy of MBA-think.
I mean sure– if your company is under cash flow pressure you have to pinch pennies. You have no choice. Spreadsheet says so, and spreadsheet’s the boss. But if you’re not, you should be investing and thinking long term cause the other guys probably aren’t.
I’ve seen a related phenomenon in the startup world. ...

Once the commitment to fix everything wrong was in place, we were off and running on the design phase. We hired an interior designer and a great facilities person to manage the process. The exec staff started meeting about the design of the new building.

The staff weighed in on what color the carpet and walls would be. And there was a lot of discussion on what style of furniture was appropriate.

If you’ve ever tried to implement an agile transition in a traditional workplace, you’ll know there are many stumbling blocks – one of the greatest being that of the existing stakeholder: Your boss, the invader from Mars explains how change can and should be dealt with by both the SCRUM and kanban approaches to agile development – and how that can easily be messed up by your boss.

The case-study especially strikes a chord with my experiences, describing a shop ...

Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.

I know exactly what the “gold backed dollar” is. It is a dollar that you can trade in for ...

Anyone doing anything creative faces non-stop death threats. I’ve read that during the early 20th century, when socialism was at the peak of its international prestige, there was none of the abuse of celebrities that we now take for common. I am left wondering if there must always be some class tension, but sometimes it gets funneled into some kind of political movement, whereas in other eras it manifests as a completely apolitical generalized threat of violence.

I don’t understand why, but apparently FourSquare gave Gnip exclusive access to its firehose. That seems like an awful lot of power to give to some outside company. Why would FourSquare do this? Maybe they didn’t have the resources to build a billing system? I’m grasping at straws here.

The most charitable interpretation is to read this as a story of an overly aggressive spam filter. The less charitable reading is to read this as Facebook not caring about its users, and perhaps Facebook trying to raise money:

A couple of days ago, I wrote this post about the hidden “Other” folder on Facebook. This secret folder contains all messages sent to you by anybody who’s not among your Facebook friends. Because you’ve probably never looked in there, it ...

Software developers don’t actually invent very much. The number of actually novel, non-obvious inventions in the software industry that maybe, in some universe, deserve a government-granted monopoly is, perhaps, two.

The other 40,000-odd software patents issued every year are mostly garbage that any working programmer could “invent” three times before breakfast. Most issued software patents aren’t “inventions” as most people understand that word. They’re just things that any first-year student learning Java should be able to do as a homework ...

Rarely has a company had so much potential and then thrown so much of it away as Facebook:

Meanwhile, Facebook has also played tough with potential competitors in the messaging space, namely Path, Voxer, and MessageMe, all of which have had their access to the “find friends on Facebook” API revoked. In the same vein, Facebook also blocked Vintage Camera, an Instagram competitor; along with Vine, an Instagram Video competitor; and Russian search engine Yandex, whose social search product competes ...

1. Many home buyers make purchases with relatively little knowledge of their local real estate markets. For instance, in some areas heavily hit by the crash, you can find buyers who don’t know that a considerable amount of the local sales activity has been driven by individual speculators and institutional buyers who are attempting to rent out the homes they purchase. They might be on a block where a double-digit percentage of the houses are rentals and not even ...

Ever since Martin Luther banged 95 theses onto a church door, the West has seen an ongoing struggle between elite workers who possess specialized knowledge, and the multinational organizations that employ them. In Luther’s case, he was taking issue with the Catholic Church, and he was sternly reminding it that it was suppose to abide by some limits:

The pope has neither the will nor the power to remit any penalties beyond those imposed either at his own discretion or ...

I’m a great believer that once something is placed on the internet for free, it should continue to stay there, for free, unless there’s an extremely good reason to delete it. Back when hosting websites was difficult and expensive, that was easier said than done. But now web hosting is effectively free, there’s really no excuse — and one might hope that, as a result, we’d see less link rot.

But that’s not what’s happening. For one thing, the institution of ...

Last November, shortly after it was announced that Disney had acquired Lucasfilm and would make a new Star Wars trilogy, Vulture’s Kyle Buchanan posited that we were entering a phase in which we would begin to see films from the same franchises over and over and over. That’s because, as Obst writes in her book, studios need movies with “pre-awareness” — titles that are familiar enough to sell in both the U.S. and abroad. Whether it’s ...

“Investment based on genuine long-term expectation is so difficult today as to be scarcely practicable. He who attempts it must surely lead much more laborious days and run greater risks than he who tries to guess better than the crowd how the crowd will behave; and, given equal intelligence, he may make more disastrous mistakes.. It needs more intelligence to defeat the forces of time and our ignorance of the future than to beat the gun. Moreover, life is not ...

User feedback [on both Tatung’s TPC-2000 and Einstein lines] repeatedly mentioned an irritation: that users often found they had to exit their current application [VisiCalc, WordStar, …] to perform simple disk operations, like finding a file on a floppy. It was a real and frustrating problem. For example, say they were running the popular WordStar word-processor and wanted to find an existing file for editing. Let’s also say they’re not sure which of a dozen floppy disks the file is ...

Yet economies do change over time, and sometimes in fundamental ways. So what’s really different about America in the 21st century?

The most significant answer, I’d suggest, is the growing importance of monopoly rents: profits that don’t represent returns on investment, but instead reflect the value of market dominance. Sometimes that dominance seems deserved, sometimes not; but, either way, the growing importance of rents is producing a new disconnect between profits and production and may be a factor prolonging the slump.

1. Ramp up drastically the training output of new doctors and nurses: More med schools, larger intakes per school, elimination of 4 years of pre-med university etc. More med school student scholarships and subsidies?

Drug A helps half of those to whom it is prescribed but it causes very serious liver damage in the other half. Drug B works well at some times but when administered at other times it accelerates the disease. Drug C fails to show any effect when tested against a placebo but it does seem to work in practice when administered as part of a treatment regime.

Which of these drugs should be approved and which rejected? The answer is that ...

Not everybody is passionate for engineering. You don’t always work with people passionate for creating wonderful software. Mostly, people have other things to do (e.g. family and kids) and writing better code is not a priority for the most. And it is okay. I learned not to expect enthusiasm from everybody.

2-3 hours of coding a day is great. Before taking the job, I was able to code 8-10 hours a day on my personal projects. Somehow in this environment it ...

Check out some of the following videos, selected from top channels, all made within the last few months. Videos like KIDS in JAIL!!, How Guys Sleep, This was the FASTEST selling video game of 2006, Epic Epic Stunt, Ambercrombie & Fitch CEO Is A Dick, TWERKSANITY!!!, all have millions of views and subscribers but about $20 of production value and content investment between the lot of them. Even the best one, from The Young Turks network, could have been ...

Every industry eventually consolidates. And the web is less open than it was 10 years ago. When does the current era end? When does capital regain the upper hand?

In the second tier, the hustler class of new-money industrialists produced a first generation of Robber Barons, and then an asymmetric balance of power between bankers and second-generation hustlers who aspired to Robber Baron level fortunes (egged on by Horatio Alger narratives), but ended up as the tame new middle class. How ...

It makes sense to me that a man who hates all gays also is in favor of fiscal restraint, as fiscal restraint during a recession is simply a ways of expressing hatred for the poor and working classes. This guy hates everyone is not already part of one of society’s favored groups.

Harvard Professor and author Niall Ferguson says John Maynard Keynes’ economic philosophy was flawed and he didn’t care about future generations because he was gay and didn’t have ...

But will any of this make a difference? The story of the past three years, after all, is not that Alesina and Ardagna used a bad measure of fiscal policy, or that Reinhart and Rogoff mishandled their data. It is that important people’s will to believe trumped the already ample evidence that austerity would be a terrible mistake; A-A and R-R were just riders on the wave.

This question occurs to me a lot. If the government never threatens to arrest you, then how do you know if you are really pushing against the limits? If you play it safe, and avoid any government threats, then are you really being innovative? Here is a guy who was willing to take big risks:

My first startup landed me in prison. Imagine a company that allowed people to eliminate the financial burden of paying for a luxury or ...

It was the , and I was a young developer 1. In college, I had aced coding exercises, as a junior dev I had cranked out code to solve whatever problems someone specified for me, quicker than anyone expected. I could learn a new language and get productive in it over a weekend (or, so I believed).

And thus, in the natural course of things, I got to run my own project. ...

I have been a fan Subversion for a long time, and I have been a fan of Springloops, through which I bought my hosted subversion. But I’ve been working a lot with git, which for a long time I have hated, but I have slowly grown used to it. And so, beginning a new project, I find that I finally pulled out my credit card and signed up for Github, so I can keep my private code there.

As the allure of programming starts fading away, we try to discover new sources of inspiration. This quest leads us to different programming languages, frameworks, fads and technologies, and, as decades pass, maybe even to the theoretical depths of programming and computer science. In the end though we have to accept that programming is a repetitive activity. We feel that we have reached a state of mastery, that we cannot, may not or probably will not surpass, out of tiredness, ...

When mutiny occurs, the leader involved usually sees it as a sudden flash that is obscene. But the members involved in the action see it differently. Like an entrepreneurial team, they formulate a strategic plan for mutiny in secret, execute it tactically, and face the risks with a sense of justice and purpose. And here is the real surprise of our research: the mutinies are usually for the better. Given the connotations of the term mutiny, and the images it ...

I recall that when I turned 28 years old, I felt old. My youth was behind me. It was time to become an adult. I had responsibilities now, I needed to be serious, play time was over, I had to grow up. I felt depressed and a little directionless, full of ambitions I had no idea how to fulfill. I was disappointed with my career so far. I felt like my options were beginning to narrow.

“My mother explained the magic with this machine the very, very first day. She said, “Now Hans, we have loaded the laundry; the machine will make the work. And now we can go to the library.” Because this is the magic: you load the laundry, and what do you get out of the machine? You get books out of the machines, children’s books. And mother got time to read for me. She loved this. I got the “ABC.” This is ...

With a fat bank account, I was pretty set to do whatever I wanted for a long time. The sale afforded me the ability to make art, invest in other companies, and unwind. But it didn’t take long to realize that my new life was a hell of a lot less exciting than running an independent company had been.

I typically refer to the IAC sale as “the worst business decision of my life.” I’m not sure IAC is worse than ...

I am reading Brad Garlinghouse 2006 memo at Yahoo. . Can anyone make a coherent argument about why a small startup is focused, and can grow, but when a big company like Yahoo buys that company, then suddenly the startup is a deadweight that is threatening the very existence of the parent company, because it make the parent company too complex, unfocused, spread too thin? One moment the startup represents innovation, growth, success, entrepreneurial vision, and then it is ...

Change is hard. Yahoo needs to change or it will die. I am surprised that Mayer is personally interviewing new engineers, but that might be needed — possibly she distrusts all of the hiring managers, and possibly that distrust is well justified. I suspect that if Yahoo dies she will be cursed as a control freak, and if Yahoo turns around she will be hailed as a great visionary leader, but in the end, as with any of us, the ...

Time goes by, and things change. The generations have their memories, places as they were. My mom grew up in the Bronx, remembers Brooklyn as a dirty working class suburb, much like the Bronx.

This year I got my mom a subscription to TimeOut magazine. A few weeks later she calls me up, amazed: “Lawrence, do you realize there is almost as much happening in Brooklyn as in Manhattan?” She says this in the tone of voice I would reserve ...

Clever. If you run ads, and want to click on the ads yourself, to get more money, most of the time the ad companies will detect your ad fraud, and your ad account will be suspended: no money for you. So how could you run an advertising fraud scheme that looked like real users, from all over the world, were clicking the links? Here’s an idea: show legit sites in frames, but every time a user clicks, have a hidden ...

Interesting. I can not fathom what is driving the big tech companies nowadays. Microsoft has an incompetent CEO and yet no one complains. Google has given up trying to own the future. Yahoo overpays to acquire new companies. Why?

I think Yahoo shareholders deserve an explanation. It’s not clear at all to me that they are getting their money’s worth.

Summly raises $1.5 million in total funding, launches to significant fanfare.

Below are the gory details. The data source is Appendix Table B-47, “Hours and Earnings in Private Non-Agricultural Industries, 1966-2012.” The table has been completely revised since last year’s edition of the report. The data is for production and non-supervisory workers in the private sector, about 80% of the private workforce, so we are able to focus on what’s happening to average workers rather than those with high incomes.. I use weekly wages rather than hourly because there ...

I strongly doubt that business strategy exists. I think nearly all cases that seem like brilliant strategic decisions were instead just luck. What does exist is inventors who are close to demographic or a technology and are therefore able to realize the potential that exists in the circumstances that they see. But even when the opportunity is real, finding the best way to exploit the situation comes down to trial and error — its all luck, and anyone pretending otherwise ...

Many companies in Germany take on apprentices, much like North American companies accept interns and co-op students. If a company decides to take you on as an apprentice, the position is guaranteed by the state. Should the company go bust, you are placed with another company the next day. There is a web of companies guaranteeing the positions for each other, spread all across the country.

Unlike interns in North American companies, apprentices in Germany are treated like normal junior employees ...

Leaders are often stupid. These last few years I have been amazed at how often I have seen this in the world of business: people in leadership positions expressing very strong, entirely undeserved, confidence. And often being proven painfully wrong.

The amazing thing is the way men who know neither theory nor the history of previous crises are utterly convinced that they know what to do in our current crisis; and how their confidence in their prescriptions has been unaffected ...

What’s needed in a new, small company is different than what is needed in a big company. And I’ve read that managers often have success, early in their careers, by acting like dictators and giving a lot of orders, but that tactic only works while the manager can see the people they are managing — if they want to rise to a higher level, where they manage many thousands of people whom they will never meet, they need to change ...

I am venting my discontent over on the forums and blogs at Adobe. I have wasted days trying to figure out the API, and many of the code samples seem to be out of date, or they focus on SOAP instead of REST. I am thinking, in particular, between the actively supported developer forums at PayPal, versus the empty developer forums at Adobe.